Can Java code EVER be GPLd, at all?

[Richard Stallman]

    >     If an application 'A' uses a library 'B' in what might be described as an
    >     'essential' way, then, irrespective of the physical mechanism of linkage
    >     (static/dynamic/run-time/compile-time/corba) I would expect 'A' to be
    >     considered as a derived work of 'A'.  Especially if 'A' is distributed
    >     together with 'B', and especially if 'A' won't function without 'B'.
    > 
    > That's the FSF's position.

    This is a very difficult position to defend, because it is so gray and
    so devoid of hard lines that it is impossible to say where the FSF
    really stands.

It's gray because there are gray areas.  I'm convinced that any simple
criterion based on mechanical distinctions has to be a bad one, so I
am not in favor of looking for one.

There will indeed be situations that are hard to judge.  For that
reason, I don't want to even try to think about hypothetical
situations.  I have too much real work to do.

But I should make one correction to what I wrote before.  I see now
that "corba" was described as a method of linkage, in the message I
responded to.  I didn't notice that when I read it before.  I don't
think that corba is equivalent to linking; it is more like
fork-and-exec or communication via pipes.  In other words, when corba
is used, I would normally tend to think that two things are separate
programs, unless there are very strong reasons to think otherwise.